Gotta laugh, show up here after a few months and nothing changes. Professor Lotr educating and schooling everyone. And everyone on the thread confirming and affirming and suddenly agreeing with the same information Lotr and I were yacking about 2 months ago. EM, hybersleep, environment equivalency for space, worm holes. Suddenly someone named Blackhawk is agreeing with everything I wrote,actually admitting he or she needed to catch up on the science and science fiction. And Lotr's even quoting Kaku with some new alternative of quantum mechanics to actually go faster then the speed of light. But hey, that's par for the course. I can imagine the Star Wars thread the same, posters eventually emulating what I wrote, after giving me the what for. Again, par for the course when dealing with large practical intelligence gaps. The lower the practical intelligence, the more the propensity to self incrimination, it just happens, posters step on their own tongues. And old EP still doling out his 20 posts a day, goal is to reach 100,000 posts about nothingness before the end of the decade. One thing's for sure, he'll accomplish that before we set foot on Mars. And by the way EP, making posts 20 times a day doesn't change the fact that you're still dumb. You were dumb 2 months ago, you are dumb now, you'll be dumb in the future. Nothing will change that. And you can try your best to try not to be dumb, but you're still dumb. Sorry Dr Xavier for spoiling your Yappi Princess gig, I know it hurts. As well as all the other dumb guys on here. Sorry, you're dumb. Don't get mad at me because its true. And now here it comes - nickname, sarcasm, bag comment, reference to Hooters (now that is funny, even I smile and laugh at it, even though it did happen). But in the end EP you're going to wake up dumb tomorrow morning, and there's not much you can do about it. Now all of you go over to the snowflake with the 30,000 posts who went on a posting tear for about a week 2 months ago about mystic geology as part of a matrix existence thread (okey doke).

Moon Express, the first private company in history to receive government permission to travel beyond Earth's orbit, announced Tuesday that it raised another $20 million in private equity financing to fund its maiden lunar mission to take place in late 2017. This brings the total amount of private investment to $45 million from investors that include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund and Autodesk.

What may have added impetus to investor interest in Moon Express is President Trump's picks for the NASA transition team — Charles Miller and Chris Shank — and the leading candidate to become the next NASA administrator, GOP Rep. Jim Bridenstine. All support commercial space ventures and manned exploration — including lunar missions.

If successful, the new MX-1 lunar lander from Moon Express would not only win the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, it would also help jump-start a new era of space exploration. Up until now, only government-funded missions from the United States, China and Russia have landed on the moon.

Every day it seems like we are learning about stuff that was believed to be scientifically impossible. Like I've always said there is no such thing as "settled science".

Here's a description of the TIME CRYSTALS they say they've made:

"This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter," lead researcher Norman Yao from the University of California, Berkeley told EurekaAlert!.

The idea of time crystals—a form of matter that appears to move even at its energy-less ground state—was first proposed by Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek in 2012. Usually, if matter is in its ground state, movement should be impossible, because it contains no energy.

The researchers say that time crystals resemble Jell-O. When you tap Jell-O, it jiggles. The only difference is that the crystals are jiggling without using any energy, without any tap. By definition, time crystals can never stop oscillating, no matter how little energy they contain.

Here's the actual scientific paper this was published in - warning very dense reading:

What's interesting about this is that telomeres are associated with aging and longer telomeres are associated with longevity. Stress is one of the things that can shorten telomeres over time. So it was surprising to find that the stress of long-term space travel did not seem to negatively affect Scott Kelly's telomeres.

At Instapundit (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/) where I found the link to this story a potential future space industry was proposed along the lines of folks maybe taking trips into space to experience micro-gravity as a way to treat aging? Hmmmm

Check out the videos embedded within as they are also fascinating. BTW the gist of this article is:

In front of us, there's a dense supercluster of galaxies some 650 million light-years away called the Shapley Concentration, and it's pulling us towards it. Behind us, scientists have found evidence of a previously unknown region of space that's almost entirely devoid of galaxies, and it's pushing us away with incredible force.

This vast, empty region of space has been dubbed the "Dipole Repeller" and it's pushing us at 1.2 million mph through space towards the "Shapley Concentration". Sounds like the plot to science fiction novel!

As an aside, the scale of what they are talking about here is beyond comprehension. Sure you can read the words in the story but the sheer size of what they're talking about.............

Breakthrough Starshot's design is a tiny micro-spacecraft attached to a solar sail. Solar sails don't actually need the Sun; they can accelerate by using light from any source. So, Breakthrough Starshot hopes to have an array of lasers give the sail and its spacecraft a boost up to 20 percent of the speed of light. That will get the spacecraft to Proxima Centauri, the closest star. Data will get back while most of the principals involved in the work are still alive.

The article also outlines some of the formidable obstacles even a probe faces in making this journey.

Awesome picture of the Martian surface. I thought it was amusing how the article was puzzled by certain aspects of the ancient Martian climate. Given we don't understand our own climate all that well is it any surprise we are clueless about the climate of Mars 100,000,000 years ago.

It is interesting that there appeared to be very little CO2 in the atmosphere back then yet the geological evidence clearly supports the existence of liquid water in the form of a lake. Assuming a cooler sun in the past (this IMO is a BIG assumption) the water should have been frozen solid as temperatures would have been way below freezing. It's an interesting paradox.

Awesome picture of the Martian surface. I thought it was amusing how the article was puzzled by certain aspects of the ancient Martian climate. Given we don't understand our own climate all that well is it any surprise we are clueless about the climate of Mars 100,000,000 years ago.

It is interesting that there appeared to be very little CO2 in the atmosphere back then yet the geological evidence clearly supports the existence of liquid water in the form of a lake. Assuming a cooler sun in the past (this IMO is a BIG assumption) the water should have been frozen solid as temperatures would have been way below freezing. It's an interesting paradox.

That is a great pic of Mars. We're lucky to live in the time where we are getting some truly exceptional pictures of the Solar System's planets, moons, asteroids, etc. When I was a kid, we didn't have anything like these close-up pictures. A few examples are the very recent images of Pluto, Charon and some earlier pictures of the Jovian moons taken by "New Horizons". Beautiful.

That is a great pic of Mars. We're lucky to live in the time where we are getting some truly exceptional pictures of the Solar System's planets, moons, asteroids, etc. When I was a kid, we didn't have anything like these close-up pictures. A few examples are the very recent images of Pluto, Charon and some earlier pictures of the Jovian moons taken by "New Horizons". Beautiful.

Can't believe there are people that are not interested.

Yea I keep looking at that picture - the clarity of the details are astonishing. It's like someplace in Nevada or New Mexico!

I've read this twice and am still trying to figure out exactly what they're saying. Suffice it say that it's very weird and that this stuff will be the foundation of the next round of amazing scientific breakthroughs. Here's a key part:

The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. “You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.” Similarly, he said, “there might be unknowns, constraints, boundary conditions, conservation laws that could end up limiting your choices in a very subtle way” when setting up an experiment, leading to seeming violations of local realism.

The idea that nature might restrict freedom while maintaining local realism has become more attractive in light of emerging connections between information and the geometry of space-time. Research on black holes, for instance, suggests that the stronger the gravity in a volume of space-time, the fewer bits can be stored in that region. Could gravity be reducing the number of possible measurement settings in Bell tests, secretly striking items from the universe’s menu?

Huh?

BTW, in addition to it's links to current affairs articles, Instapundit links to some great tech stories:

Consider this: the longest-lasting probe that made it to the surface of Venus survived for a grand total of 2 hours and 7 minutes before its circuits were fried. Nope, Venus's scorchingly hot, corrosive, and heavy atmosphere isn't exactly inviting – but new electronics developed by NASA could give us our best chance yet of studying this toxic hellhole up close.

If we can actually drill down to that big sea under Europa we may finally have the answer to just how rare life is. As the 2nd article notes:

The extraterrestrial world of Europa is considered as among the most likely places in the solar system to have the ability to support life as we know it. Scientists have gathered evidence that the salty ocean that lurks beneath the icy crust of the moon could be hospitable to life. Recent models also hint that the icy world can produce oxygen and hydrogen, which suggests it may have the necessary energy to support life.

That was very cool and yes it illustrates nicely just how big the solar system is. But I would suggest that the world looked even bigger to King Edward the first in 1300 then the Solar System does to a Yappster in 2017!

That was very cool and yes it illustrates nicely just how big the solar system is. But I would suggest that the world looked even bigger to King Edward the first in 1300 then the Solar System does to a Yappster in 2017!

Small enough for him to kick the Jews off the island and chase them on a Crusade.

Small enough for him to kick the Jews off the island and chase them on a Crusade.

Eratosthenes didn't need to guess in 200 BC.

I chose King Edward because I recently saw Braveheart! My point was that even though he was a king he had no idea that Australia, North America & South America even existed.

We are sending probes to the farthest reaches of the Solar System where they take measurements and send us back dazzling pictures. Intellectually, the Solar System is smaller to us than the world was to King Edward. Now that doesn't change the absolute physical dimensions which have the Solar System much larger but with the exponential rate of human advancement we will have people living on the moons of Jupiter, on the Moon, on Mars and among the asteroids sooner than the time between King Edwards reign in 1300 and when humans began their 2nd wide spread invasion of the Western Hemisphere in the 1500's.